The glimpses of the moon by Edith Wharton – A book review

I begin the year with matters of the heart – not bad!

Edith Wharton’s romantic novel starts with two lovers enjoying a moonlit night. The moon – a romantic orb, a lover’s muse! Lovers make of the moon what they want to – a comparison, a resemblance, a poem, a sonnet. Its beauty is safe at a distance – an object to marvel and awe upon, guarded from a likelihood to lose its luster from proximity and accessibility.

Ediith Wharton is one of those writers I have come to respect a lot because of her comprehension of people’s hearts and minds and for her effortless articulation of subtleties in their thoughts, words, behavior and mannerisms. In her stories, she gently rips apart veils of correctness and exposes the endless lines of scruples. The ‘Age of innocence’ and ‘House of mirth’ are two of my favourite books. She is as articulate in this one, laying bare the confusions and distortions in the heads and hearts of both sexes but somehow I didn’t find it as captivating as the earlier two reads.

It is probably because the characters, for what they are and definitely not for the way they are penned down, didn’t quite appeal to me. Rather, it won’t be untrue if I said I despised most of them. The protagonist couple Suzy and Nick Lansing, living off the affluent, privileged and elitist society, is not the kind I really look up to or hold in high regard – I’d rather reason out for a murderer. And it becomes preposterously tedious when this parasitic appeasing lot, sponging on high society, reveals a moral spine and a mind of its own. Nothing wrong with having your own values, whatever they might be, but it takes an ugly form when one attempts to be the head and the tail at the same time, to one’s benefit.

Suzy and Nick have lived their separate lives in such proud servitude and now when they each have found the rebellious other, they enter into a frivolous marriage – a contractual one, a pact unshackling the tethers the institution of marriage is generally associated with. Their elite friends have decided to help the couple live off their fortunes for a year and make their houses available to them in turns.

But there are no free lunches, there never were, especially with the rich, especially for the not so rich – the dependents. The privileged need playthings to while their time with, to feel important, to have them listened to and at times to hide their dirty laundry, and the poor appeasers are obliged to keep their secrets for them – a payment in kind for the privileges they are bestowed upon with. Not everyone thinks it to be an obligation though, not Nick! And when he finds his wife think of her conniving with her benefactor to keep the benefactor’s illicit affair an obligatory repayment, he is appalled by the thought and loses no time to abandon her with an urgency, in the very second month of their marriage.

What follows, as they go back to blending into the rich colours of the elite society, is their individual struggles to find out if it was love in the first place and a series of events that allow them to question themselves about their values and actions in the midst of a society marked by money, privileges, selfishness and authority. Can one have the best of both worlds? – the cunning and shameless can, I suppose. But do Nick and Suzy continue with what they think is right or what is right? And what is right, anyway? To own up has never been easy – to own up your love, your mistakes, your immoralities, your imperfect thoughts because we twist our values to what suits us at that point in time; we convince ourselves of it.

The story also highlights the fact that in a demanding situation, most of the times one ends up thinking and acting for the other person – speaking is an option but it often turns into an onerous task and the silence, open to a multitude of interpretations, ultimately makes it even worse.

In the end, I did soften a lot towards Suzy. I would have shaken hands with them both for what they finally did and the way they did it. A little unbelievable, but then that’s romance for you. Half way through the book though, I was only pleading out of impatience and boredom – okay tell me the end, let’s just finish this quickly, whichever way it goes; I had started caring less for the characters.

My rating: 6/10

Image copyrights:

Book cover - https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/product/the-glimpses-of-the-moon-edith-wharton-first-edition-rare/

Edith Wharton - https://www.famousauthors.org/edith-wharton